You're wrong. They're making it cost holy power, and you will now stack holy power on aoe pulls with Hammer of the Righteous, which will be given to ret in MoP. (At least that's how it was last time they mentioned it).

Ya I think you are right, CS/Judge/Exorcism Procs+TV for Single Target and HotR/Judge/Exorcism Procs+DS for AoE pulls.

You're wrong. They're making it cost holy power, and you will now stack holy power on aoe pulls with Hammer of the Righteous, which will be given to ret in MoP. (At least that's how it was last time they mentioned it).

This^.

Your AOE rotation will be HOR, HOR, HOR, DS.

That is of course assuming you can attain enough haste to not need fillers.

Meaning that unless they make some decent sized changes haste will work allot like it does now for ret. Useless until a certain point & then useless after you attain that point.

(I'm really hoping they make Mana something that ret has to manage as a main resource & turn inquisition into something passive because managing a buff like inquisition is a shitty measure of skill given how screwed up holy power generation can be even with the 4 piece bonus)

The way balancing for WOW PVP works is allot like American politics.
1: Be lazy & ignore problems till the yelling is so loud your cant concentrate.
2: Refuse to do the things you have Said need to be done, then make up reasons why they cannot be done.
3: Lay the blame for problems on someone else even when it's your fault because you did all of the above.

Meaning that unless they make some decent sized changes haste will work allot like it does now for ret. Useless until a certain point & then useless after you attain that point.

(I'm really hoping they make Mana something that ret has to manage as a main resource & turn inquisition into something passive because managing a buff like inquisition is a shitty measure of skill given how screwed up holy power generation can be even with the 4 piece bonus)

Mastery is actually looking pretty pathetic compared to haste. Haste with the new Sanctity of Battle will affect the GCD of all HP generators (excluding Hammer I think) and affects the cooldown of Judgement, HotR and Crusader Strike. That's considerably better than it is now.. but it needs to lower the GCD of finishers, as well - to keep the whole thing consistent and flowing. Currently, it would make finishers feel like a punishment without Sanctity of Battle affecting their GCD.

Mastery is actually looking pretty pathetic compared to haste. Haste with the new Sanctity of Battle will affect the GCD of all HP generators (excluding Hammer I think) and affects the cooldown of Judgement, HotR and Crusader Strike. That's considerably better than it is now.. but it needs to lower the GCD of finishers, as well - to keep the whole thing consistent and flowing. Currently, it would make finishers feel like a punishment without Sanctity of Battle affecting their GCD.

It'll actually make for a more logical AoE rotation, although some people may not like it. You'll CS to build HP and TV as a finisher for single target. You'll HoR to build HP and DS as a finisher for AoE. Pretty hard to say which is better(the current model or the mists model) from a DPS perspective at this point because there's a lot of unknowns but it at least makes sense.

The biggest question with secondary stats is with what kind if scaling table they put them on. The stats themselves don't necessarily need to do anything extra to make them better, they just had such terrible scaling because of how out of hand WotLK got. If they go back to a scale where 20-30% haste and crit are possible they'd be a lot better. If they stick with a similar scale but just improve what haste effects it would definitely improve it from it's current state but it's impossible to say if it'd really end up passing other stats. Definitely a possibility though.

Opps, didn't read that keyword in there which made it make no sense at all but ya that would make sense. You lower the CD and GCD for your HP builders but dont' for the finishers, after so much haste you will pretty much continue to use builders while finishers on CD and having 3HP already.

If you look at the calculators you can see they have to idea WTF their doing with paladins yet as almost everything in the tree & skills is just a copy paste of what they already have (while every other class got a ton of new shit)

There is a certyain degree of that with every class.

However, the paladin tree was especially disappointing.

Part of the problem here is the actual nature of the class. It manages to fall into every single weakness of the new talent system..it has three roles, but no real unified style that those roles share. Other hybrids might share a combat style (warriors are all melee) or role (all mages are dps).

Personally, given their desire to change the talent system and GCs latest post on roles, I'd actually liike them to be more radical than they are.

Mkae each class a hybrid.
Give one tree per role.
How about we simply do away with specs and allow the classess access to all their moves regardless of spec...and then use the new talent system to provide the key differntiator.

Something.

Hopefully they do allot of changes for the good (implement more better balance mechanics, better offensive tools etc...)& do a great deal to flush out the tool set that ret has because right now compared to other DPS specs it's so anemic that it could use a transfusion. (that's even considering what small changes the spec is getting in the already shown talent calculator)

Merge Prot with Ret....it'd have a far more complete toolkit for both roles with each covering for many of the others weaknesses. Keep the flavour abilities and add a few tricky signature fun moves.

(I'm really hoping they make Mana something that ret has to manage as a main resource & turn inquisition into something passive because managing a buff like inquisition is a shitty measure of skill given how screwed up holy power generation can be even with the 4 piece bonus)

The class needs something. Having melee moves require 3 HP and then having every move generate HP simply renders that mechanic null and void. You may as well just generate 1 HP every GCD.

Mastery is actually looking pretty pathetic compared to haste. Haste with the new Sanctity of Battle will affect the GCD of all HP generators (excluding Hammer I think) and affects the cooldown of Judgement, HotR and Crusader Strike. That's considerably better than it is now.. but it needs to lower the GCD of finishers, as well - to keep the whole thing consistent and flowing. Currently, it would make finishers feel like a punishment without Sanctity of Battle affecting their GCD.

AFA I'm concerned - the entire SoB mechanic is major flaw with the class design. Its a lazy solution to a problem introduced by flaws in the classes basic resource management system.

If you don't like the mastery raid buff, you're free to quit WoW. Lots of people are already quitting. Many raid buffs are being removed. Don't get your panties in a knot though, it's all a balancing game, and blizz will do their part to keep the scales [mostly] balanced. Inb4 blizz doesn't know how to balance.

Mastery is actually looking pretty pathetic compared to haste. Haste with the new Sanctity of Battle will affect the GCD of all HP generators (excluding Hammer I think) and affects the cooldown of Judgement, HotR and Crusader Strike. That's considerably better than it is now.. but it needs to lower the GCD of finishers, as well - to keep the whole thing consistent and flowing. Currently, it would make finishers feel like a punishment without Sanctity of Battle affecting their GCD.

OK I pretty much laughed because I was thinking to myself as I read about this originally, Ret gets a mastery buff? I bet mastery will suck for us in the expansion then...

A blue post said that they're going to come out with an updated MoP talent calculator soon, so I'm curious as to how things will be changed in the newest iteration. Hopefully they fix these basic issues, at least.

Part of the problem here is the actual nature of the class. It manages to fall into every single weakness of the new talent system..it has three roles, but no real unified style that those roles share. Other hybrids might share a combat style (warriors are all melee) or role (all mages are dps).

This ^ exactly.

If you look at the other hybrids new talents then look at the paladin ones they are very lack luster.

Looking at most of the other hybrid classes you will notice that most of their talents fill multiple roles across each spec and provide a great deal of flexibility in the case of the classes capable of 3 different roles, where as almost all of the paladin talents are defensive in nature (with exception to a couple ones ret already has or the few new ones that are supposed to make up for not having a decent gap closer but will only be sub par at best)

Retribution Paladins need to come a long way still if they are ever going to be balanced & designed on equal footing with many of the other classes.

Currently they need a few things

1: A reliable gap closing mechanic or a truly viable alternative (say what you want a magic snare that can be easily dispelled is not a gap closer & would only do any good if you can get to melee to begin with, the new long arm of the law shown is actually a nerf from what they have now since they will lose Pursuit of justice, The only half decent one is Pursuit of Justice).

2: If the class is going to lack an instant gap closer + snare then it could use a reliable way to generate holy power at a range on a shorter CD then judgment. (depending on how haste scales with the new sanctity of battle it could do this if ret gets lucky. If not then they could always just make exorcism always be instant & generate a charge of holy power when used but only have a zero mana cost & do double damage when it's procced, the mana cost would prevent it from being spammed)

3: More constant reliable self survivability & less dependency on long cool downs. (this means some tool other then WOG for managing your health, a small passive heal applied to TV or another ability would work well, or they could make sacred shield a bit more like it was in wrath while keeping the dispel immunity on it.)

4: Some way to further separate between roles to ensure that none of the specs are too proficient at more then one role at any given moment but still have flexibility (Blizzard admitted that every class capable of 2 or more roles needed some form of stance/presence/form mechanic back in wrath because the lack of one made it impossible to balance correctly in WOW. Seals could fit this role perfectly without a whole lot of changes needing be done, just lower base damage & healing done to others slightly then tack a + healing + damage or + threat modifier onto SOT SOR & SOI)

5: A true primary resource to manage (holy power is at basically a glorified cool down & thus best serves when working with another resource system more akin to something like energy, rage, runic power or focus. As a plus if one of these were implemented there would be no more need for an ability like inquisition which at best is clunky & the designers themselves have admitted they don't like.
So call the new resource system faith or whatever, hell it could even be a simple modification of mana so that it acts like energy or focus but whatever it is it needs to happen)

If these things ^ were done blizzard would finally have got paladins of all specs in a much more balanced position & I'm sure they would have a ton of happy players. Sadly the management team at Blizzard seems to constantly have attitude that they don't care which results in putting off balance & design till the last minute & a constant state of Beta for paladins & ret in particular.

Last edited by zcks; 2012-02-14 at 05:37 PM.

The way balancing for WOW PVP works is allot like American politics.
1: Be lazy & ignore problems till the yelling is so loud your cant concentrate.
2: Refuse to do the things you have Said need to be done, then make up reasons why they cannot be done.
3: Lay the blame for problems on someone else even when it's your fault because you did all of the above.

Simple and effective solution for the future of Paladins: Mana shouldn't be the resource for Prot & Ret. Most of the casted healing spells are taken away from these specs, then why still keep mana as a resource? Seperate the caster from the melee!

Let Holy use mana via intellect and define shared abilities as consuming a percentage of the base resource, meaning mana for Holy and some other form of resource (energy or rage equivalent) for the other two specs. Trust me, not only will it make more sense but this approach will also make things a lot easier for Blizzard to remedy the problems the class suffers from and make each of the specs more enjoyable to play with.

Originally Posted by Jonuts

Pretty sad when being deathgripped is my most reliable gap closer! THAT is some BS too.

I agree that Paladins need an overhaul in general (that includes holy since we seem to be the favorite healer for nerfs) but I will wait and see what happens with the updated talent calculator before making any comments on what else may need to be changed.